The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to positioning techniques in wireless communication systems.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include fourth generation (4G) systems such as a Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems or LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems, and fifth generation (5G) systems which may be referred to as New Radio (NR) systems. These systems may employ technologies such as code division multiple access (CDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), or discrete Fourier transform-spread-OFDM (DFT-S-OFDM). A wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations or network access nodes, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
In some cases, a UE may be a low-cost or low-complexity machine type communication (MTC) device that may communicate with a base station in a narrow subband, or narrowband regions, of a system bandwidth of a wireless communications system. Such UEs may be referred to as narrowband devices. Because of the reduced bandwidth available for communications between a base station and narrowband device, some periodic signals provided by the base station may have reduced opportunities for transmission, which may impact some UE operations. For example, a base station may transmit a positioning reference signal (PRS) at a predetermined time period interval, which may be used to determine an accurate position of the UE. Determining the position of the UE in an enhanced MTC (eMTC) environment may be a challenge using traditional positioning techniques.